Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iOS Safari 500 Tab Limit

F

F27

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 24, 2022
125
155
When you open 500 tabs in iOS Safari it won’t let you open anymore but if you click a link it will. What’s odd is that it still shows that 500 tabs are open, not 501.

When you close that tab it goes to 499 which suggests it’s closed some other older tab. Problem is doesn’t tell you which one and it doesn’t appear in the recently closed tabs menu.

Does anyone know the criteria for which tab is closed when this happens? It’s not the oldest (first) one, I checked.

It’s a terribly vague system imo, either close the oldest or show which one was closed in the menu. Now I don’t know which tab I lost. I wasn’t aware of this behaviour till today.
 
ThommiTechnik said:
500 Tabs in a mobile device?!?! You can‘t even handle this on a stationary Mac. So why on a mobile device, and why such a question?!
Click to expand...

Old tabs do not load into memory, it’s a URL and and small screenshot of the tab. Takes up basically no resources whatsoever so saying it cannot be handled even on a Mac is nonsense. I’m asking the question because there is a limit, a way iOS handles it, and I want to know how it functions.

Plenty of people run up large numbers of tabs, I regularly have had that number and more on both mobile and desktop devices. My old Andriod phone with 2GB RAM had several hundred before I offloaded them.
 
I ran into this problem so I cleared a good amount of tabs to avoid this issue.

If I have to guess it could be the tab that was last visited the longest time ago.
 
Paddle1 said:
I ran into this problem so I cleared a good amount of tabs to avoid this issue.

If I have to guess it could be the tab that was last visited the longest time ago.
Click to expand...
That’s what I thought as well, the logical thing would be for Safari to close the oldest tab but it doesn’t because my very first tab was still there. Surely there is some specific choice it makes on which tab it closes.

I think it might be the last tab used outside the current month but who is going to be able to figure out which one that is!
 
It always deletes random tabs for me, which I believe is the most oldest tab
 
Apple put a tab ‘limit’ which is a limit that you can actually break… then they go and steal some random tabs off you as punishment! Wow Safari really sucks.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: addamas
Good for you to test out for us. Seriously I don’t really care if Apple will change the handling or not.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back